Blocked From Mattering

In a review of Anne Cvetkovich's new book, Depression, A Public Feeling, psychotherapist Talitha Stevenson connects writer's block to "solicitor’s block and banker’s block and designer’s block and surgeon’s block":

The degree to which the “block” gives rise to “depression” in writers, or non-writers, may depend on each individual’s adjustment to the impossibility of “mattering” in any way that obliterates the fact of death, the possibility that there is no God and the minuteness of the self in the grand scale of time. Existential fears, like the literary ones that give them a specific iteration, may be a grown-up way of recalling the first experience of powerlessness, of “not mattering” to a mummy busy with an independent life.